Archive for the ‘Comet’ Category

The jury’s out on what’s causing the sound (which is far, far below the level of human hearing) and a whole lot of theories are being tossed around about it. Everything from magnetic fields to ionization of particles shearing themselves from the traveling comet is suspect at this point.

“This is exciting because it is completely new to us. We did not expect this and we are still working to understand the physics of what is happening.” – RPC principal investigator Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier

Until there’s an answer, which probably won’t be soon because space is just weird, we’re going to assume that the comet is either harboring a Predator who’s looking for payback, the mobile rehearsal space for a marimba-playing Cantina Band member or that we’ve discovered the dial-up connection for an alien race.

December 21st of this year is the big party date for the supposed end of our world.

Sure everyone’s already ordering kegs, ordering faux “Danger: Apocalypse In Progress – Do Not Cross” banner tape by the case and prepping for their end-of-the-world get-togethers.

But then again…everyone hasn’t been watching the news coming out of Mexico that clearly shows an active volcano and something entering it from the sky like an old Thunderbirds vehicle.

Falling star? Busted satellite? No one’s sure at this point but seriously…the odds of something as agile (sarcasm, kids…sarcasm) as a giant mountain full of raging lava catching an object from space? Slim.

We’ll let you put all those party supplies back, start handing you some nails and plywood and make sure your shotgun’s loaded.

A newly identified comet is coming home for the holidays. And by holidays I mean mid-December and by home I mean the Sun. So really that first sentence doesn’t mean anything. But a comet is going to graze the surface of the Sun, most likely disintegrating it.

The comet is categorized by astronomers as a “sungrazer” and it is destined to do just that; literally graze the surface of the sun (called the photosphere) and pass through the sun’s intensely hot corona, where temperatures have been measured at upwards of 3.6-million degrees Fahrenheit (2-million degrees Celsius).

We should get some pretty wicked images from the daredevil space racer’s death defying stunt. In the slim event that the comet survives, we might even be able to see it in broad daylight.

Scientists have studied a centuries worth of comet data and come to the conclusion that at least 20 percent of visible comets were kicked out of the Oort Cloud by a Jupiter-sized object lurking at the solar system’s outer edge. Eighty percent of objects pushed out of the Oort cloud could be explained by the gravity of the galaxy, but the remaining comets would have required an object 1.4 times the mass of Jupiter to kick them out.

In 1999, Matese and colleague Daniel Whitmire suggested the sun has a hidden companion that boots icy bodies from the Oort Cloud, a spherical haze of comets at the solar system’s fringes, into the inner solar system where we can see them.

In a new analysis of observations dating back to 1898, Matese and Whitmire confirm their original idea: About 20 percent of the comets visible from Earth were sent by a dark, distant planet.

An object such as a brown dwarf would knock out more than 20 percent, but “Something smaller than Jovian mass wouldn’t be strong enough to do the deed,” Matese said.

You can see it now but make no mistake, the Hartley 2 is coming. Not unlike the Hulk, it’s green, it’s unstoppable and it will come very close to destroying the Earth before moving along peacefully.

Comet Hartley 2 will swoop within 11 million miles of Earth on October 20, one of the closest approaches of any comet in the last few centuries.

Hartley 2 is already visible as a pale green streak in the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia. NASA astronomer Bill Cooke caught the comet on September 28 in a 4-minute exposure taken from a remotely-controlled telescope in Mayhill, New Mexico (Cooke himself was in his home in Huntsville, Alabama, according to NASA’s Watch the Skies blog).